We Read Science Fiction

A big thanks to Steve Eley over at EscapePod for letting me know about Stanislaw Lem. Last year when I started working back through his archives on my new iPod I came upon episode #47 (Poet for Hire). In the intro Steve talked about Mr. Lem and his book about two competing, sentient, robotic inventors: The Cyberiad. I purchased it the next day. Lem is often compared to Douglas Adams, though it appears he never liked that comparison. I laughed at page after page of dialog, crazy situations and inventions created by the two main characters Trurl and Klapaucius. If you enjoyed The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy then you’ll enjoy this one too. I’ve included a few of my favorite quotes and some links to some other samples below.

Summary: The Cyberiad is Excellent! These short stories cover serious topics with fun and humorous characters who tackle their situations with crazy inventions and witty dialog. At must read for Douglas Adams fans, but a great choice for everyone else.

Stanislaw Lem is a Polish science fiction writer whose books have largely been translated by Michael Kandel into English. This particular one is a series of short stories that all revolve around the competition and friendship between the two main characters Trurl andKlapaucius.

Knowing that the book was written in Polish and later translated into English, I was absolutely astounded how some passages were translated. Take, for example, this short passage where Klapaucius sets a challenge to Trurl’s Electric Bard:

“Have it compose a poem — a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism and in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!”

“And why not throw in a full exposition of the general theory of nonlinear automata while you’re at it?” growled Trurl. “You can’t give it such idiotic–”

But he didn’t finish. A melodious voice filled the hall with the following:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed.
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

Later, in the same story the Bard composes a poem called the Cyberiad, only part of which is reproduced below — since it’s three pages long! Translating poetry, while keeping the cadence and rhyme is a challenge, but doing it using mathematical descriptions that often use different words in other languages? Astounding.

Love and Tensor Algebra

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

However, it is not the translation that makes this an interesting read. In fact, the translation is so good that unless you’re an English professor you probably won’t catch any problems with the word choices, sentence structure or pace. I didn’t.

What makes this book interesting is the sheer fun of it. Applying the logic of Quantum Mechanics to Dragons, devising electronic Bards who never falter in a challenge, and even creating machines that can create anything that begins with the letter N, including Nothing (but not nothing!).

Read it for yourself, and feel free to disagree in the comments, but this is certainly a 4/5 in my books. Not exactly “Must Read” but pretty close.